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LindaMBeale: “The constant right-wing talk of deficits and debt as justification for stripping the safety net (while still conferring outsize gains on the ultra rich and Big Business) (is) so disgusting.

I’ve noted that we tried that already. We doubled down on reaganomics policies of tax cuts/militarization/deregulation/& privatization throughout the Bush regime, and that got us into a witch’s brew of problems.

Because of that double-down mentality, where the neos told us war was good and greed was good and where we applied the laughable, made-up-out-of-whole-cloth “Laffer theory” that told us there was no evil that tax cuts (especially for the rich and big corporations) couldn’t conquer, the Bush regime very ably turned a budget surplus into a staggering deficit and a financial crisis that would guarantee more deficits and debt before we were done with it.

We ended up with failed (de)regulatory policies. They allowed Big Banks and their big moneymakers to speculate their way into phantom billions of profits (all soaked up by the big jefes/big moneymakers). But instead, we got a near-breakdown of the financial system, that forced all us ordinary taxpayers to subsidize the Big Banks’ losses without getting recompense from the banksters’ earlier oversized payouts.

We ended up with failed tax (cut) policies. They cut taxes on big multinational corporations and the ultra rich, based on the claim that those are the “job creators” that we should reward. But instead they only ended up siphoning off needed revenues from programs that could build infrastructure and support quality education and research. They privatized education by providing lots of federal loan money to students that went to for-profit schools, only to learn that those schools tend to be traps that don’t educate but just take money for the profit of the “education” business. They quit funding the stuff we need, so they could subsidize those that didn’t need it. And they kept the subsidy up–for Big Oil, for wealthy decedents–even when the money was just piling on for those that already had lots of it.

That’s what makes the current ultra-partisan Congress and the constant right-wing talk of deficits and debt as justification for stripping the safety net (while still conferring outsize gains on the ultra rich and Big Business) so disgusting. The right still refuses to pay attention to facts and justifies this oft-discredited, clearly wrong-headed market-fundamentalist and class-warfare orthodoxy as “plain as day” correct thinking.

ASIDE: This seems sort of like the GOP’s plans for gaining the loyalty of our increasing diverse electorate by being careful to package their mostly white, Friedman-orthodox, oligarchy-favoring policies in the sheep’s clothing of multicultural spokespersons who avoid the “tell” of who they really are and use words that talk about ordinary people as though the policies were actually aimed at benefitting them. Meanwhile they double-down on their claims that redistribution upward is all about job creation, and condemn those who talk about preserving the safety net by NOT reducing benefits as “socialists” who don’t understand the American way...